In the public sector, non-disruptive operations can literally be a matter of life or death, with mission-critical operations relying on a complex set of infrastructure to be "always on.” Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2 is designed for non-disruptive operations with transparent upgrades and hardware refreshes. ONTAP 8.2 has the ability to seamlessly expand capacity and performance. Also, it can rebalance critical workloads without downtime. As agencies collapse Data Centers and multiple departments are sharing the same infrastructure, it becomes close to impossible to take scheduled downtime, and Clustered ONTAP 8.2 is designed to eliminate the need for downtime. NetApp’s AutoSupport statistics show our customers enjoy greater than 99.999% uptime.

In consolidated Data Centers, it becomes vitally important to provide a controlled multi-tenant environment. Clustered DATA ONTAP 8.2 introduces the concept of “Storage Virtual Machines”. Just as agencies currently provide each department or mission one or more isolated virtual machines on common hardware, they can now deploy NetApp Storage Virtual Machines, each logically isolated and instrumented with Quality of Service controls to let each department get exactly what it needs. This Software-Defined Storage capability forms the foundation of a Software-Defined Data Center and promises to do for storage what VMware did for servers.

Clustered ONTAP 8.2 also continues to deliver on NetApp’s heritage as the most efficient storage available. With sequestration and other fiscal realities forcing across-the-board belt-tightening, now is not the time to overspend on inefficient storage. NetApp includes efficiency technologies such as deduplication and compression natively in Data ONTAP. And Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2 extends our next-generation backup technology, SnapVault, to take fast volume-based backups over the network, preserving compression and deduplication over the network and at the remote site – perfect for remote government agencies or tactical deployments where connectivity may be sketchy.

Finally, Clustered ONTAP 8.2 allows for consolidated government data centers to scale on-demand to immense amounts of storage all managed as one single cluster. You can start small with a single or two-node “cluster in a box” with a few TBs for easy deployment and grow over time up to 24 controller nodes, supporting 69PBs of storage and single containers up to 20PBs in size. With over 1.5M IOPS, 49,000 LUNs, 12,000 volumes, and 100,000 end clients, Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2 can scale to meet almost any U.S. Public Sector need.

NetApp is proud to support the U.S. Public Sector with the release of Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2. We believe that its combination of non-disruptive operations, seamless scalability, and proven storage efficiency will serve our customers in the Federal, State, Local, and Education communities well, and enable them to take major steps into the Software-Defined Data Center with a solid foundation of NetApp Software-Defined Storage.